delenda est

male exterminatory about

[borgqueens]

We are Borg. Our pronouns are they/them plural. We are the only valid instance of they/them pronouns. Resistance is futile

[feministdragon]

Chapter 3 of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies: Colonization and Housewifization

In this chapter Maria Mies leads the reader up to her main thesis, the housewifization of women, its benefits to capitalization, and its relationship to colonialization. (She expands on these in the next chapters, so don’t worry if you don’t quite understand the connection yet just from reading this chapter!) Along the way she also makes a case for direct connection of the witch hunts to the development of science, law and the formation of the state. In order to get there she compresses nearly a thousand years of history into a few paragraphs, which if you aren’t that familiar with European history (cough cough like me cough) can be hard to follow. After a lot of frantic reading, I’ve done my best to fill in gaps! A good companion for this chapter is Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch which helps with some of this. Aside from the weird postmodern body-based language in the first few chapters, Caliban brings some more information and a different framework to the women’s history table. [Also recommend Wallerstein’s The Modern World System, which does decently explain how capitalism came into existence despite not once mentioning women as a class.] 

Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7

Chapter 3: Colonization and Housewifization

The historical development of the sexual division of labour was not evolutionary, progressive, or peaceful, but was instead a violent process. Women are the main producers of things people need to live, but men use warfare and conquest to ‘produce’ everything society needs by holding women producers hostage and taking what they produce. This accumulation of material wealth through looting and robbery also facilitates the faster development of technology. Arms and transport tech development is the main driver for technological development for all patriarchal societies, but this has been particularly the case in Europe, which has conquered and subjected the whole world since the fifteenth century. The European concept of ‘progress’ is historically unthinkable without the one-sided development of the technology of warfare and conquest. Culturally, all the technology for creating well being and supporting life (gardening, cloth-making, renewable energy) is seen as backwards and simple-minded compared to war tech (navigation, the compass, gunpowder, etc). 

The sexual division of labor is a predatory division of labour, based on a separation and subordination of human beings.  Men are separated from women, "Our own’ people are separated from ‘foreigners/heathens’. Man is separated from Nature. In the old patriarchies, the separation could never be total, because the subjected people were still visibly present. When capitalism arose as a world-system, based on large-scale conquest and colonial plunder, and through the emergence of the world-market, it became possible to externalize anyone the new patriarchs wanted to exploit. They were no longer a part of the economy or society, they were outside ‘civilized society’. The outsiders were naturalized, declared to be wild savage nature waiting to be tamed by male ‘civilizers’. 

This polarization between patriarchs and nature could now develop its full destructive potential. Science and technology became the main productive forces through which men could ‘emancipate’ themselves from nature, as well as from women. The modern European Patriarchs made themselves independent of their European Mother Earth, by conquering first the Americas, later Asia and Africa, and by extracting gold and silver and other ‘raw materials’ and luxury items from other lands. They also ‘emancipated’ themselves from European women’s control of the production of new laborers by destroying the ‘witches’ and their knowledge of contraceptives and birth control. Thus, the ‘progress’ of European men is based on the subordination and exploitation of European women, on the exploitation and killing of Nature, and on the subordination and exploitation of other peoples and their lands.

The laws governing the concept of ‘progress’ are always contradictory. Evolution for some means devolution for others. Humanization for some means de-humanization for others. Development for some means underdevelopment and reverse development for others. The rise of some means the fall of others. There cannot be uniform progress for all because our economic system is a non-reciprocal, exploitative relationship. If the wealth of the cities is based on the exploitation of colonies, then the colonies cannot achieve wealth unless they also have colonies. If the emancipation of men is based on the subordination of women, then women cannot achieve equal rights with men, because that would mean having the equal right to exploit others. In a contradictory and exploitative relationship, the privileges of the exploiters can never become the privileges of all. 

That means that feminism has to aim for the total abolition of dominance relationships. It must aim for an end to all exploitation of women by men, of nature by man, of colonies by colonizers, of one class by another. As long as the exploitation of any person remains the precondition for the advance of any section of people, we cannot speak of liberation or socialism. 

This chapter will briefly sketch out the process by which, in the last 4-500 years, women, nature, and colonies were externalized, declared to be outside society, pushed down, and made invisible like the underwater part of the iceberg is invisible, even as it is the foundation and support for the visible part. The emergence of European science and technology and its so-called mastery of nature is linked to the persecution of witches, and both of these are linked to the slave trade and the destruction of the subsistence economies in what became the colonies of European states. 

Among the Germanic tribes who occupied Europe, the house-father (pater familias) had a power, called munt, that meant that he had the property rights over his wife, children, and slaves, founded on occupation (kidnapping) or purchase (sale of women). This munt was established through marriage. Under Germanic law, marriage was a sales transaction between two families, and the husband therefore acquired the right over the wife’s belongings, as she was also his property. Women were under the munt of the men in their life, their husband, father or son, for their entire life. However, if unmarried women had property of their own and were successful at a trade, they were sometimes called selbstmundig, meaning self-munting, a kind of self-ownership. In Munich it was stated that “a woman who stands in the market, buys and sells, has all rights her husband has”, except of course she didn’t have the right to sell her husband’s property. 

This liberalization happened in the 13th century partly because of the high demand for skilled crafts. At this time there was an increased demand for manufactured consumer goods, clothes and luxury goods, and so female artisans who were skilled workers in all the crafts and especially in the luxury cloth trade found lots of work. There was also a relative shortage of men during this time—only 10 men for every 11 women—not only because of the constant warfare with the middle east (the Crusades) but also because of the near-constant worker rebellions and also warfare between the feudal states. 

Another factor was that legal marriage was extremely restricted during this period, in part to avoid landholdings becoming divided, in part because the guilds limited the number of journeymen who could become masters in order to keep their groups smaller and manageable (journeymen could not marry), and in part because serfs could not marry without the consent of their masters. Poor people in the countryside had to send their daughters away because they could not afford to feed them until they were married. At the same time cities opened their doors to non-citizens, creating a place for unattached people to gather and live. This combination of these factors meant an increase in the number of unattached, single, or widowed women who had to be economically active.

Besides the crafts, women also engaged in the petty trades, selling fruit, chickens, eggs, herrings flowers, cheese, milk, salt, oil, feathers, jams etc., which was a challenge to male traders, who did not like having such successful competition. Women did not engage in foreign trade, though they sometimes made investments in male merchants who traded in foreign markets. 

There were other opportunities for women outside of the trade and agricultural communities. Beginning in the late 1200s, a massive number of people formed into wandering or settled groups outside of feudal state or city control. Some of these groups followed the armies of various wars, some congregated in the cities, getting work in the cloth manufactories, and some organized themselves into utopian projects that actually fought with feudal lords for political power and control of land, often setting up communal governments promoting equality of people and sharing of resources that stayed around for thirty years or more. [Some Beguine communities, celibate separatist organizations of single women who engaged in work and trade to support their communities, stayed together over 100 years, with some persisting to the early 20th century. -feministdragon]

One subset of the people living outside feudal, church and city control were the Heretical movements—where people formed societies loosely based on Christian ideals but not conforming to the Church ideology—and they were especially organized, presenting more of a threat to the feudal powers. Women participated in and sometimes were among the leaders of these groups, which promoted freedom and equality for women and a condemnation of sexual repression, property and monogamy. 

Their ideas were branded as heresy and heretical by the Catholic Church, which along with the feudal states, searched for solutions to the social instability and loss of power of the church and state that these groups represented. The Inquisition, which started in the late 1200s, and which also existed alongside the later witch hunts, was used to root out several different threats to the Catholic church over the years, but was started in part to bring these heretical sects under control and establish the continuing authority of the Catholic Church. Through the Inquisition many men and women in these alternative-community movements were burned as heretics. 

Over the course of the 1500s and 1600s, the old local European feudal order came to be replaced by a European world economy based on capitalist-style production. [By ‘world economy’ Maria Mies means that the European economy was forcefully merged with those of other lands and began to influence the history of the world. These lands included north-west Europe and the Baltics, the Christian Mediterranean, Central Europe, and certain regions of the Americas. Not yet included at this time period are India, the Far East, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, or China. -feministdragon] This expansion of the European economic base is characterized by a rising middle class, and also by extreme poverty, wars, epidemics and turbulence within the core European states. 

This expansion enabled the large-scale accumulation of private capital, used among other things to finance the reorganization of agricultural production into a form that was more compatible with investment and profit-creation, and created a period of extreme inflation, called the ‘Price Revolution’. During this process, the people of Eastern Europe were returned to being bound to the land as serfs exploited for grain or animal production, and the people in the areas that are now Britain and Germany were thrown out of their homes and prevented through Enclosure from accessing common lands or any form of subsistence besides paid work, creating a large population of landless and hungry people. 

In the 1500s and 1600s, this process of reorganizing the land for capital investment and dispossessing the people of their access to commons land—removing their ability to feed and clothe themselves—created incredible hordes of hungry people. The social upheaval created by the economic reorganization as well as the horrors of constant wars between the various feudal states continued to inspire people across Europe to set up a social order that did not include the wealthy merchants, the feudal states, or the church. Women were very often leaders of these new societies, which were often successful for decades at a time. It seems plausible that much of the fury of the witch-hunt was a reaction of the new male-dominated professional classes against the ‘rebellion of women.

The witch trials were not only conducted by the Catholic Church. In Protestant countries there were secular witch commission and commissars, while religious leaders were in constant rapport with the courts and influenced the judges. But also whole classes of professions developed through the money and professional practice generated by the lengthy and frequent trials, which followed a meticulously thought-out legal procedure. If someone denounced a woman as a witch, a commission was sent to that place to collect evidence. Everything was evidence: good weather or bad weather, if she worked hard or if she was lazy, diseases or healing powers. If under torture the witch named another person, that person was also immediately arrested. The accounts of the torture of the women were kept in detail. If the women lasted through excruciating pain and still insisted on their innocence, they might be taken down from the torture device and unbound, their limbs set in place and nursed back to ‘health’, but it was far more likely to end in death by burning or hanging. 

The persecution and burning of the midwives as witches was directly connected with the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a natural science, the rise of science and of the  modern economy. The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body—mainly the female body—were studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were stablished on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies. 

There is also a direct connection between the witch pogroms and the emergence of the professionalization of law. The witch trials provided employment and money for a host of lawyers, advocates, judges, councils, etc. They were able, through their complicated and learned interpretations of the authoritative texts, to prolong the trials so that the costs of the trial would go up. There was a close relationship between the worldly authorities, the church the rulers of the small feudal states and the lawyers. The fleecing of the people was so rampant that even the Elector of Trier Johann von Schoenburg (one of seven people who had the authority to elect the German Kaiser), who himself had several hundred people executed as witches and sorcerers, had to rein in the robbing of widows and orphans by all the learned jurists and all the others connected with the witch trials. 

The fact is that the witch-hunt was a lucrative source of money and wealth. When the accused were found guilty, they and their families had to bear all the costs of the trial, beginning with the bills for food and wine for the witch commission and ending with the costs for the firewood for the stake. Another channel of wealth transfer was the sums paid by the richer families to the learned judges and lawyers in order to free one of their members if she were accused as a witch. This is also a reason why we find more poor people among those who were executed. 

Another aspect of the political economy of the witch hunt was the raising of funds by the warring European princes to finance their wars, particularly the Thirty-Year War from 1618-1648. Witch hunts were specifically organized or encouraged by some princes in order to be able to confiscate the property of their subjects. In some cases the cities and the princes used witch-pogroms and confiscations as a kind of development aid for their ruined economies [ruined by the wars and social upheaval]. The city fathers of Mainz did not make much fuss about legal niceties and simply asked their officials to confiscate all property of the witches. People and organizations also paid a kind of protection money in order to not be targeted, as in the Monastery of St Clare of Hochheim, who donated 2,000 guilders (around 40,000 in today’s money) for the eradication of ‘witches’. 

Besides the big bloodsuckers, there also grew up a whole army of small fry who made a living out of the witch burnings, including begging monks who would wander around and sell for instance pictures of the saints that you could swallow to prevent you being afflicted by witchcraft. Also, since the authorities paid fees for the discovery, arrest and interrogation of witches, self-appointed witch-commissars accumulated money by going from place to place, instigating poor people to see the cause of their misery in witchcraft. Then when everyone was good and riled up, he would send his collector to go from house to house to collect money to prove that the peasants had themselves invited him. Then he would organize a few burnings. If someone refused to pay, they were accused of witchcraft. In some cases a village paid a sum to the commissar in advance so that he wouldn’t come to their village. The hope of financial gains can be seen as one of the main drivers of the witch hysteria: the witch-hunt was business. 

The capital accumulated in the process is never mentioned in the calculations of the economic historians of that era. This blood-money was used for the private enrichment of bankrupt princes, of lawyers, doctors, judges, professors and priests, but also for financing wars, building bureaucracy, infrastructure and the new absolute state. It may not have been as great as the plunder and robbery of the colonies, but it was certainly to a much greater extent than is recognized today. 

The persecution and torture of witches was not only about getting money. It also provided the model for the development of the new scientific method of extracting secrets from Mother Nature. Francis Bacon, the ‘father’ of modern science, the founder of the inductive method, deliberately used the imagery of the witch-hunt to describe his new scientific method. He treated ‘nature as a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions’, ‘for you have but to follow and as it were hound out nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again’. ‘Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object’. (Caroline Merchant, 1983, p168)

According to Bacon, nature must be ‘bound into service’, made a ‘slave’, put ‘in constraint’, and ‘dissected’, just like a ‘woman’s womb had symbolically yielded to the forceps, so nature’s womb harboured secrets that through technology could be wrested from her grasp for use in the improvement of the human condition’. 

Bacon’s method is still the foundation of modern science, which unified knowledge with material power. Many technological inventions are in fact related to warfare and conquest, like gunpowder, navigation, the magnet. [and on through the contributions of chemistry: artificial rubber, fuels, engines, rocket propulsion. Also the contributions of computer science: data collection, robotics, drones, AI. -feministdragon] Violence was the key method by which ‘Man’ established his domination over women and nature. 

The persecution of the witches was a manifestation of the rising modern society and not, as is usually believed, a remnant of the irrational ‘dark’ Middle Ages. The interrogation of witches as symbol for the interrogation of nature, the courtroom as model for its inquisition, and torture through mechanical devices as a tool for the subjugation of disorder were fundamental to the scientific method as power. The class which benefitted most from this new scientific patriarchal dominance over women and nature was the rising protestant, capitalist class of merchants, mining industrialists, and clothiers. For them it was necessary that the old autonomy of women over their sexuality and reproductive capacities be destroyed, and that women be forcibly made to breed more workers. The church, the state, and the new capitalist class and modern scientists collaborated in the violent subjugation of women and nature. 

One term for the period of time we’ve been discussing—roughly the 1500s to the 1700s—is the period of primitive accumulation of capital also sometimes called the early modern period. Before capitalism could establish itself, enough capital had to first be collected to be able to start. Calling it the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital makes it sound like a peaceful, passive process, when instead by the end it had actually violently overturned the lives and cultures of more than half the world. The peoples of the Americas were enslaved, tortured and decimated by disease and slaughter, whole regions like Haiti and the Amazon completely depopulated. The peoples of South-East Asia found themselves plundered, tortured, enslaved and occupied, the land and forest they depended on for their lives often completely destroyed. A later example of this is when the Dutch wholesale destroyed the cinnamon trees and the lives of the people who depended on them in Molucca in 1848 to keep the price of cinnamon from dropping too far in Europe, incredible long term devastation for such a short-term goal. The peoples of Africa found themselves occupied, plundered, their people ripped from their homes and transported to the other side of the world to be worked to death in the slave trade that began in 1440 and quickly became one of the main components of the transatlantic trade. 

All of these horrors were carried out as commercial ventures. At first these ventures were carried out by companies which were formed for individual voyages, invested in by wealthy individuals and princes, and dissolved after each voyage. However as the wealth developed the companies became permanent, financed by stable stock markets and investment companies, and grew to be as large and sometimes even more powerful than the nation states they represented.

Despite the fact that the whole point of all this activity was the wealth gained by investors and states, the whole brutal onslaught on the peoples in Africa, Asia and America by European merchant capitalists was justified as a civilizing mission of the Christian nations. Here we see the connection between the ‘civilizing’ process by which poor European women were persecuted and ‘disciplined’ during the witch-hunt, and the ‘civilizing’ of the ‘barbarian’ people of the colonies. Both are defined as uncontrolled, dangerous, savage nature, and for both the ‘civilizing’ mission was just an excuse for the need to subdue them by force and torture and break their resistance to being robbed, enslaved and exploited.

We now move on to the slave economy of 1655-1838, focussing on the Caribbean, to talk about how female slaves were first forbidden to marry and then later encouraged/required to marry, both of which were based on capitalist cost-benefit calculations. At first the loss of the woman’s work during pregnancy and early child care interfered with profits, and later when the trade of new slaves but not slavery itself was outlawed, the need to produce new slaves became a problem for the capitalists. 

During the period of large-scale sugar production in big plantations from around 1760 to 1800, slave women were actively discouraged from bearing children or forming families, because ‘it was cheaper to purchase than to breed’, regardless of whether they were under catholic (French) or protestant (British, Dutch) dominion. As the 1700s drew to a close, British colonizers saw it as more profitable to incorporate Africa itself into their empire as a source of raw material and minerals. Therefore there was a movement toward the abolition of the slave trade, which happened in 1807, and a movement towards encouraging slave women to marry and produce children to create new slave labor instead.

This sudden change of policy seems to have had little effect on the slave women themselves. In the long years of slavery the women had internalized an anti-motherhood attitude as a form of resistance to the slave system, and they continued a kind of birth strike till about the middle of the 1800s. 

For more than 100 years the majority of slave women in the Caribbean were neither wives nor mothers and by exercising control over their reproductive capabilities were able to deeply affect the plantation economy. These years were exactly the same period that women in the European homeland were domesticated and ideologically manipulated into wifehood and motherhood as their ‘natural’ vocation. While one set of women was treated as pure labor force, a source of energy, the other set of women was treated as if they were only ‘non-productive’ breeders. 

Nevertheless, around 1780 new Slave Codes began to encourage marriage among slaves in order to create more workers, but the slaves ridiculed the idea of marriage and continued their ‘common law’ unions, which afforded both the women and the men a lot more freedom in their personal affairs. Europeans took this relative equality between the sexes to be a sign that ‘the Negro race’ was primitive and backwards, a view held by colonizers and ethnologists in the 1800s. 

That equality between men and women is a sign of backwardness and that it is a part of the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British colonialists to destroy the colonized women’s independence and teach colonized men violence and sexism is very clear in a book about Burma published in 1906, describing the British colonial administration in Burma between 1887-91. In the book the author suggests that Burmese men had to be taught to kill and fight for the British colonialists, to ‘open their eyes to new views of life’, and that Burmese women should surrender their liberty. “It must never be forgotten that their civilization is relatively a thousand years behind ours’, he wrote. “Men and women are not yet differentiated in Burma. It is the mark of a young race. In the earliest peoples, the difference was very slight. As a race grows older the difference increases.” Then he goes on to describe how Burmese women are eventually ‘brought down’ to the status of the civilized, dependent housewife. Local industries, formerly in the hands of women, were destroyed by the import of commodities from England. Women were also pushed out of trade. All of this to make Burma a ‘progressive’ land where men ruled. 

“When she is dependent on her husband she can no longer dictate to him. When he feeds her, she is not longer able to make her voice as loud as his is. It is inevitable that she should retire.  The nations who succeed are not feminine nations but the masculine. It improves a man to have to work for his wife and family, it makes a man of him. It is demoralizing for both if the woman can keep herself, and if necessary, her husband too.” (A People at School, Fielding Hall, p266)

African women brought to the Caribbean were not backward or less civilized than the colonizers, but instead were made into savages by the colonizers. This is made clear by the changing attitude of the Europeans who came to Senegal. The original Portuguese and French merchants were totally dependent on the cooperation and goodwill of the powerful signares, women traders of 1700s Senegal. These women, mostly of the Wolof tribe, were in possession of great wealth and great culture, with such a sense for beauty and gracefulness that the Europeans who first came into contact with them were amazed. Many married the Senegalese traders and lived according to the Wolof style, their daughters growing up to also become powerful traders. However when the British came to West Africa, the attitude changed, and they turned the women into prostitutes, which then ‘proved’ the racial superiority of the white male. 

“British authors are discreet about such matters, but it can be discerned that in contrast to the family lives of traders and the signares, there developed a rootless bachelor community of a type found elsewhere in British areas of West Africa. Open and unrepentant racism was one characteristic of this community; two others were reckless gambling and alcoholism.” (The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth Century Senegal, George Brooks, p43)

The colonial process, as it advanced, brought the women of the colonized people progressively down from a former high position of relative power and independence to that of ‘beastly’ and degraded ‘nature’. This ‘naturalization’ of colonized women is the counterpart of the ‘civilizing’ of European women. 

The ‘defining back into nature’ of African woman is perhaps the clearest evidence of the double faced, hypocritical process of European colonization. African women were downgraded to savages while white women in the fatherlands were upgraded to ‘ladies’. This is not just simply a historical parallel. The creation of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ women, and the polarization between the two, is the organizing principle of capitalist colonialism, as well as of patriarchy.

Looking at the German colonization of South West Africa will help us more clearly see the double-faced process of colonization and housewifization. Germany began colonization rather late, but followed a similar path as the Europeans in Senegal, first marrying and forming families with African women. After a while it became evident that these new Euroafricans would, following German law, become Germans with full economic and political rights. There were heated debates about the ‘native question’ in the Reichstag. On the one hand there was the problem of ‘mixed marriages’ and ‘bastards’, meaning a concern for the privileges of the white race, and on the other there was the problem of the production, subjugation and disciplining of sufficient African labour power for German estates and projects. And so in 1905 a law was passed prohibiting marriages between Europeans and Africans, and in 1907 another law declared previous marriages null and void, and in 1908 the wives and descendants lost the right of citizenship, including their voting rights. The objective of this law was clearly the preservation of property rights in the hands of the white minority. 

To substitute, German men were advised by doctors to recruit African women as concubines or prostitutes. In the German view, black women were good enough for sexual service, but could not become proper wives because that would change property relations.

This subordination of African women also had an effect on the German women, both the ones ‘back home’ and on those who joined the colonizing mission. If the problem was reproducing the white ‘master race’ in the colonies, it was only possible if women from the ‘fatherland’ would go to the colonies and marry ‘our boys down there’ and produce white children. Girls from the peasant or working class, who had previously worked as maidservants, were trained and sent to South West Africa. These women then ‘rose’ to the level of the middle class lady whose mission was to teach the African women the virtues of civilization: cleanliness, punctuality, obedience and industriousness. It is amazing to observe how soon these women, who not long ago were still among the downtrodden themselves, shared the prejudices against ‘dirty and lazy natives’ so common in colonial society. 

Not only did the few European women who went to the colonies as wives and ‘breeders for race and nation’ rise to the level of proper housewives through the oppression of the colonized women, so too did the women ‘back home’; first the middle class, then the women of the working class. All were domesticated and civilized into ‘proper housewives’.

So from here we begin addressing Maria Mies’ main concept, the housewifization of women as one of the main components of our current economic organization: capitalism. There were two sides to the housewifization process. On one side was the violent oppression of European women during the witch persecution, and of African, Asian and Latin American women during the colonization process, as described above. The other side was the domesticating and disciplining of women in the economic core of Europe and later the US into becoming consumers and displayers of luxury and wealth. On the one side was the absorption of energy and resources, and on the other the creation of the market, with value being extracted from both sides. 

There was several things going on in the process of domesticating and disciplining women to accept their new role under capitalism. There was a process of creating a culture of desire for luxury goods and conspicuous consumption which included re-imagining women as decorative objects. This began with the luxury imports for the upper classes in the 1600s and 1700s, continued through the wealth displays of the merchant classes in the 1800s, winding through the scientific home chemistry and management of the 1910s and 20s to the ideal of the post-war housewife of the second half of the 20th century with her luxury appliances, full-color beauty and home-improvement magazines and enormous decorated kitchen. 

At the same time, there was a steady removal of women from so-called ‘productive labor’, confining her in the home and re-defining the work of feeding, housing, clothing and taking care of people as ‘not real labor’. This subordinated her to the working-class man, leaving all money-earning labor to him without competition, and also providing him a personal body-servant and home-maker. In a way this was giving him his own colony to exploit for material gain and a sense of power and control—he may not have land, but he has a woman to work for him. Putting women under the domestic control of the man accomplishes two things: It disciplines women into accepting a very limited cultural and political role, handing her freedom and autonomy over to him, who can then use this power over ‘his’ woman to console himself about the loss of his own freedom and autonomy under the discipline of capitalist labor. Curtailing the limited freedoms of the working class woman and the landless man by binding them up to each other in little nuclear-family colonies was necessary to produce and train new workers for the capitalist machine. 

Besides providing a colony for the man, the other purpose of the nuclear family was to create a cultural institution in which to confine and mislead women. Romantic love as a concept was used to gaslight the middle class woman into desiring marriage and motherhood, and religious shame and legal controls were used to discipline both the middle and working-class woman into compliance through the cultural setup of a nuclear family. Taking away women’s control of their own reproduction using legal, cultural and religious means, as well as restricting access to contraceptives to force women into pregnancy, was how the state ensured a continuous supply of new workers. 

Let’s talk about these in a little more detail. In the beginning of this period of transformation to capitalism, the participation of upper class women was essential in creating a culture of consumption, starting with luxury. The things stolen, looted and traded from the colonies were not only daily staples, but also luxury items: spices, textiles, silk, precious stones, fine muslin cloth, sugar, cacao, precious metals. The market for most of these goods were a class of women who had risen as the mistresses of the princes and kings of France and England in the 1600s and 1700s. These women, in their role as consorts to the powerful men, created the fashions in dress, cosmetics, eating habits and home furnishings. These men of the aristocracy and merchant class, left to themselves, wouldn’t have had the imagination, sophistication and culture to invent such luxuries. These new luxury ‘needs’, powered by access to the money accumulated by the state, created the market for early capitalism. This is not saying that women were ‘the real power behind the scenes’ who pulled the strings. The point is that in the beginning capitalism was fueled and financed out of luxury consumption and not just to satisfy subsistence needs, and this is relevant to our discussion of the relationship between colonialization and housewifization. 

This tremendous increase of luxury among the ruling classes and the wealthy merchant classes created a new attitude towards how wealth should be displayed. Whereas medieval luxury was public and community-oriented, displayed in the marketplace, on public buildings and at festivals, it now became secluded inside the palaces and houses of the rich. There was also a tendency towards objectification. Instead of wealth being counted in the number of followers or vassals—the people you could attract—it now became expressed in the goods and material items you owned—commodities bought by money. 

So on the one hand, the spread of luxuries jump started the concept of consumerism, of people whose entire job is to buy products, without with capitalism could not exist. You cannot have a market without buyers. You cannot turn the entire world into a market without creating entire classes of people who buy—and buy more than they really need—out of desire rather than need. 

At the same time, you need the workers to produce the products. And not just workers—you need disciplined workers who respond immediately to command, are flexible when production needs change, and who don’t complain or push back when they are asked to bear costs outsourced to them by the profiteers. In order to get those workers, you need to create a social structure that will both produce those workers in quantity, but also make sure they’re healthy and train them up to be the kind of workers needed for what’s being produced. The nuclear family works very well for this purpose. 

The concept of the monogamous nuclear family as we know it today includes the definition of the man as ‘head’ of the household and ‘breadwinner’ for the non-earning legal wife and children. Until roughly the 1800s, this form of marriage and family were only possible among the propertied classes. Among peasants, artisans, and workers, women had always been major producers of things needed in everyday life. The production of fiber and cloth and garments, the production of cheese and other dairy products, as well as beer and wine, the gardening and production of fresh produce, the small-game hunting, the housebuilding and repairs, the organization and storage of materials, keeping things orderly and healthy, the care for the babies, elderly and sick, all these things that become paid services and products in a capitalist system were all formerly work done by households, and mainly women. However, in the nuclear family, this work is taken away from her and she becomes a housewife. Or rather, she still does much of this work (especially when it is difficult to supply through the capitalist economy), but it is now classed as ‘not real work, only housework’, because it does not generate an economic surplus or earn money. 

The creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption became a very important capitalist strategy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The household had been discovered as an important market for a whole range of ‘time-saving’ gadgets and items, and scientific home-management became a new ideology for the further domestication of women. A war against dirt, germs, and bacteria was started to create a market for the new products of science and the chemical industry. This new scientific home-making was also advocated as a means of lowering the men’s wage, because in order to keep the house ‘well’, these costly new products had to be bought, eating into the household’s earnings, as provided by the (mostly) male waged work. 

Saying that the nuclear family was invented to both take ‘productive’ and ‘waged’ labor away from women and turn them into consumers, is not to say that people didn’t have families before capitalism. People have always had family relationships and ties of blood and affection. It’s the concept of the nuclear family—father, mother, children and no other primary relatives—which we in the present day have been taught is the only true form of family, that didn’t really exist before capitalism. 

There were a few historical conditions that helped create this nuclear family ideal. For the working class, there had been restrictions since the 1300s on the marriage of people without property. From the perspective of the labor guilds, they needed to control the number of masters to keep control of decision making, so fewer journeymen were made masters, and only masters could marry, own workshops and become economic actors. From the perspective of the feudal landowners, marriage meant your workers potentially moving away to someone else’s land, so they heavily controlled marriage among their workers. Common law marriage and children were therefore quite widespread, and family relations were more of a relationship network mixed together with neighbors and friends, rather than being an economic unit. Understanding yourself as an economic and social family unit in terms of lineage and inheritance was only for those with property to pass down. 

So as the concept of a family as an economic unit spread, the merchant class declared family a private territory, secluded from the ‘public’ sphere of economic and political activity. Women were withdrawn from the public sphere of economic and political activity and shut up in their cosy homes where they could not interfere in the war-mongering, politicking and money-making of the men. 

The merchant and middle classes created the ideology of romantic love as a compensation for and sublimation of the sexual and economic independence women had before the rise of this class. The idea was that women’s sexuality had to be curbed to make sure there were not too many poor people to use up the scarce food supply, but they should also not use contraceptives, because this gave women too much control over the number of new workers produced. The domesticated wife should sublimate their sexual energies into creating a cosy home for the hard working breadwinner. Capitalism did not destroy the family, it created the family, and with it the social category of housewife.

The ideal of the domesticated privatized woman, concerned with ‘love’ and consumer goods and dependent on a male ‘breadwinner’ was popularized through the culture, first in the wealthy trading class, then the middle class, and finally in the working class. It was necessary to spread the nuclear family ideal to the working classes as well, because they had no material interest in the production of children. Since there was no property to pass down, working-class children were not insurance for old age like the sons of the bourgeois middle class family. And quite frankly, women could see that their children would not have good lives working 15 hours a day in spinning mills, and that they would have little to no support in raising these children. In the factories, women were cheaper workers—they had no workplace protections or organizing power because they were excluded from the guilds. The extreme exploitation of women’s labor and child labor, their health destroyed by overwork and appalling work conditions, meant that women weren’t invested in creating a new generations of workers for capitalism or for fighting wars. At the same time, the relative financial independence of the working woman presented a threat to the promotion of the ideal middle-class domesticated woman, so it became necessary to also domesticate the working class woman and turn her into a housewife as well. The working class woman had to be housewifized, even though she could not afford to sit at home and wait for the husband to feed her and her children. Even if she still worked outside the home, this was turned into a loss of social prestige for the breadwinning husband in order to prevent women from deriving social status from earning money as a ‘productive’ waged worker. 

The concept of the ‘family’ had to be forced upon the working class so they would produce enough healthy children and socialize them into being the next generation of controllable workers. The state needed to produce enough new people to have the labor to remain competitive with other nations, and so through legislation, police measures and the ideological campaign of the churches, the sexual and reproductive energies of the proletariat were channelled into the nuclear family, the production unit of new workers. In 1868 the law prohibiting marriage for propertyless people was abolished, and sexual intercourse before marriage and outside it was criminalized. Infanticide was criminalized and in 1871 abortion was made a crime, and was made a sin through the churches as well.

Marriage was uplifted into an important church sacrament and the morality of sex outside marriage condemned. Employers and other overseers were even given police powers to watch over the ‘morality’ of their workers to enforce these new laws and social mores. At the same time working class organizations actually fought for the right to have the family and against forced celibacy of propertyless people, as this was considered ‘progressive’. Arguments for higher wages were also justified through the need for ‘a man’s wage being sufficient to maintain a wife who could look after her children’. In this way the family was created by force in the working class, and it worked because by this time women had lost most of their knowledge of contraception, and the legal and cultural force of state and church had drastically curbed women’s autonomy over their bodies. 

The marxists organizing against capitalism also fell into this trap, seeing the proletarian woman as a wife and mother rather than a worker. She was expected to struggle against the capitalists together with the men of her class, and also create new barriers against the capitalist exploitation of the proletarian woman by giving her rights as a wife and a mother. The final goal of the woman’s struggle was not to freely compete with the men but to establish the political rule of the working class and then retire to her home to take care of the men and the children. This created a contradiction in socialist ideals. Women were to freely become paid workers as part of their emancipation, but at the same time the man should be the breadwinner and head of the family and women the dependent housewife and mother, and the nuclear family was the progressive model.

The working class woman had nothing to gain from this model, but the working class man had everything to gain. Men have a material interest in the domestication of the female class-companion: he wants the right to monopolize the available wage-work, and he wants the control over all money income in the family. In Marx’s analysis of labor power, that the worker has a ‘non-working housewife’ means all female work is devalued, regardless if it is wage-work or housework. 

Housewifization means the externalization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists. [When you externalize a cost, that means you make someone else pay for it. For example, when a company uses hourly labor scheduling to keep food workers from being on the clock during the slowest part of the day by making them take a 3-hour break in their working hours, they are externalizing the costs of lower sales to the workers, reducing the worker’s earnings rather than the company’s. The unpaid time and energy that women spend on buying food, cooking and cleaning up from meals, cleaning clothes and houses, managing the family’s schedules and needs, taking children to school and other educational events, taking sick and elderly relatives to the doctor, all of these are costs of time and money that capitalism has successfully externalized onto women. -feministdragon] Working with the social institution of marriage, capitalism is able to treat women’s labor like a natural resource, freely available like air and water. Capitalism has successfully externalized the costs of maintaining current workers and developing the next generation of workers onto women. 

At the same time housewifization means the total atomization and disorganization of these hidden workers. Women who are separated into individual houses having little communication with other women in the same situation do not have a network of coworkers they can tap into for mutual aid, much less a union whose leverage they can collectively use to bargain for better working conditions, better pay, and more time off. This separation between women is not only the reason for the lack of women’s political power, but also for their lack of bargaining power. As the housewife is economically and socially linked to the wage-earning breadwinner, the freedom of the working class man to sell his labour power is based on the non-freedom of the housewife. The rise of the working class man was paid for by the subordination and housewifization of the working class woman. 

Turning women into housewives has important benefits for the capitalist economic system. It keeps the male wage earning worker docile and controllable because he has his own personal colony: a family and domesticated woman, through which he becomes civilized and a full member of the culture nation. Even if he doesn’t own land or property, he owns a woman, and can still be lord and master. More importantly, women’s unwaged labor represents an externalization of costs that would otherwise have to be covered by capitalists. These costs can be pushed onto the household budget, and shortfalls can be blamed on the workers and not the system itself. And finally the total atomization and disorganization of these hidden workers, the women, creates a lack of political power and bargaining power, which means there is no pushback on this externalization of costs. 

[borgqueens]

"If the emancipation of men is based on the subordination of women, then women cannot achieve equal rights with men, because that would mean having the equal right to exploit others. In a contradictory and exploitative relationship, the privileges of the exploiters can never become the privileges of all." -- this is such a great response to the people who say, oh, but women and men have equal rights under the law now, so we don't need feminism anymore.

OP, I really appreciate that you did extra research and added contextual notes too.

I have a question, in chapter 2 Mies linked the historical emergence of male violence to men figuring out that the tools they used to hunt animals could also be used to enslave women. I thought she meant that happened globally, but this chapter seems to contradict that when it points to European colonization as the cause of the subjugation of women in the colonized countries, who previously had a higher social status.

Does Mies give a reason in later chapters for why the men in non-European countries hadn’t implemented their own version of patriarchy by that point? Was it because the targeted campaign against women via the witch hunts developed along with the scale of the economy, and the Europeans just happened to get there first because of environmental factors or resource availability or other factors?

Sorry if this comes off as a homework question or something lmao, I'm just trying to understand how the statements in this chapter and the previous chapter are linked together. It's entirely possible I missed something while reading your two posts because social media has destroyed my attention span.

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[feminist-space]

[baddywronglegs]

The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that

[shrewreadings]

Не верите. Доверите.

Do not trust: verify.

[herssian]

"there is no way you're not using chatgpt for at least a few things here and there no matter your stance on it" what the FUCK are you talking about

[allykatsart]

[hydrachea]

> turns on my computer

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

> disables a new AI fea

[sluttygrandpa]

Honestly, at this point, if you're still bitching about AI but not moving to open-source and nonprofit software/tech/services, you deserve it. Shut up or stop using it. Those of us who've put in the effort to switch to non-evil tech are sick of the purposeless whining.

[hydrachea]

I've been nicely letting everyone suggest open source on this post because it might genuinely be useful to someone but because you've decided to be a condescending little bastard- this might be a hard concept to grasp, but some of us actually have jobs. Some of those jobs also provide us with computers equipped with an OS we have zero say over, to use software we also have zero say over. Kindly get off your high horse and suck my dick.

[sage-nebula]

As someone who has worked in IT for the past 17 years, I'd also like to say that there is often a higher barrier of entry for open-source software / operating systems when it comes to technical knowledge and ability, and those who can't jump that barrier still deserve to not have AI programs installed on their devices without their knowledge or consent. Someone who struggles with Windows is not going to be able to just hop into Linux, especially when they probably have other things going on in their lives and don't have the time to sit down and learn a brand new operating system. Someone who doesn't even recognize that there are different browsers, much less open-source ones that aren't Chromium forks, isn't going to be able to seek out one they can both a.) safely download, b.) install, and c.) use instead of the shortcut they know as The Internet.

And sure, you can dismiss these people as lazy, as stupid, as being elderly and so who cares. But from my 17 years of experience, I can tell you that technical instinct and ability varies widely across the entire adult spectrum. And I can also tell you that people have different strengths, and that just because someone isn't good with computers doesn't mean they aren't smart as hell.

And I can also say, again, that it really doesn't matter.

Companies like Microsoft and Google sneaking AI software into devices and software without the consent of those using the software or devices is wrong. It's invasive and raises major security concerns. People should not have to learn entirely new operating systems to escape this nonsense. It's an unreasonable expectation, and it fails to hold companies like Microsoft and Google accountable for their malicious behavior.

[kalira]

As someone who has changed up entire workflows and platforms I use I will continue to 'whine' about AI being jammed needlessly into fucking everything. For all the reasons above which I won't repeat.

And also because there isn't an alternative for everything, either. Not to mention sometimes you (I) go through all the work of finding one, changing processes and information, and then whoopsies oh look now it's also using AI, or dropped, or broken, or unsecure.

[linya333]

10 to 15 years ago if my computer or phone wanted to update, i would immediately restart it because updates meant security patches which made my systems safer.

Now my phone wants to update and i will put it off as long as possible because i just know it's either going to try to add more ai junk in or turn it back on and i am going to have to dig through all my settings again trying to find ways to disable it.

[africanaquarian]

I thought I needed a new laptop but nope, youtube is slowing down your PC if you have adblock on on any open tab...

[astraltrickster]

To be very clear about this: CPUs aren't magical devices that can operate forever. They generate heat. They wear out over time. This happens faster when they're operating near capacity. This is not just an attempt to inconvenience you; this is an attempt to damage your property.

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

Fuck Google, and I hope they get sued into oblivion over this.

[fernwah-funzone]

i see everyone in the notes talking about newpipe but nobody's talking about youtube alternatives for desktop

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

it is a free, open-source alternative YouTube front-end. in addition to not having ads, it has other great QoL features like a download button. try one of the several instances on that link up there ^^^^

[saintjosie]

so i was super pissed and concerned about this but i have just discovered that while this is true, it is apparently only true for google chrome users. i just tested this by having ten tabs open in firefox playing ten different youtube videos at the same time and my cpu usage spiked to 25% as the videos were loading and then dropped back down to 10% as they played.

if you ever needed another reason to switch to a different browser, this is it.

[diana-lostandfound]

"If you acknowledge that male biology plays a role in perpetuating male violence you're just removing accountability from men" is a truly braindead take.

If I get hit by a truck, and I say, "I think part of the reason my injuries are so bad is because it was an 18-wheeler," are you going to say to me, "nooooooo it has nothing to do with the size and speed of the truck!! Don't take accountability away from the driver!!!"? Of course not.

You deny evolution when you insist that male biology has NOTHING to do with their dangerousness. It's nothing but male propaganda designed to silence women into not naming the problem. There is no reason that we cannot simultaneously acknowledge the problem AND hold men accountable -- but they've made it into a false dichotomy and you're so scared of having the wrong opinion that you fell for it. It's literally #notallmen logic repackaged with some sciencey words like "bioessentialism" to shut you up and keep your eyes closed.

The same reason men are less healthy than women is also why they're more intrinsically--biologically--evil and dangerous. The lack of a second X chromosome means there is a no backstop for a wide variety of disorders and neurocognitive impairments, many of which facilitate violence. If a female has a corrupted gene on one X chromosome, she's got a whole other one, doubling her chances of having healthy gene expression. XYs do not have this and that's why there are so many more males with profound intellectual disabilities, they die earlier and have more cancer and disease, etc. There's no backup, they're stuck with one X.

Do you know why humans have sexual dimorphism? Because your forefathers were violent rapists. If men had not been oppressing women for millennia, they would not be so much larger than us on average. We would be the same size, like many species where males and females show similar levels of aggression.

Give yourself some credit for your pattern recognition skills (how many of your foremothers had to die brutal violent deaths at the hands of men for you to have this innate ability??) and stop letting men intimidate you into turning your brain off.

[femfatal3]

To acknowledge the fact of the matter is not removing accountability for their actions. I argue the opposite. Because they are predisposed to violence, they MUST have swift consequences and longer prison sentences for rape, child molestation, and domestic violence. That is quite literally the only thing keeping so many of them from violently raping/abusing others. If they believe they can weasel their way into 6 months for child molestation, they will be more likely to commit that crime.

[amilta]

[artemissreborn]

IT WAS NEVER "NATURAL".

[evenlesssentimentaltranslator]

This whole thing has made me hate men more. Right wing men want their slaves back and left wing men are just mad that they can't afford a slave.

[evenlesssentimentaltranslator]

And left wing handmaidens, don't think I don't notice the way y'all sanctimoniously scold tradwives for being antifeminist in between your dutiful condemnations of "terfs" and "swerfs".

[evenlesssentimentaltranslator]

People want SO BAD for this to be women's fault because people don't actually want this structure of society to be dismantled.

[barbievspredator]

Right wing handmaidens want every woman to be a private property of a man, and hopes she will manage to get herself a good benevolent master so the abuse and violence will happen to other women.

Leftist handmaidens want to have a separate class of women who are considered public property, so they would absorb male violence instead.

[blackpilljesus]

I saw this from the female separatism subreddit & the responses are some of the biggest reasons for separatism et al (or extinction if I'm being candid here). Moids cant be reformed they are fully aware of the hell they force women to live in. MaIe achievement & happiness is rooted in female exploitation & life. Their glory days are based on our horrific days. No amount of love, kindness or facts will change maIes and we cannot happily or even neutrally coexist with them.

Main points across answers:

Many want to experiment but not permanently be women

They dont want to be in constant danger or lose their autonomy at the hands of maIes for merely existing

They dont want to deal with childbirth (& periods)

They dont want to have to share spaces with species much stronger than them with ulterior motives

It makes me go crazy seeing people give moids benefit of doubt for their evil like "maIes just dont understand", "we need to teach maIes", or claiming that maIe violence is a result of maIes struggling with (expressing) their feelings. I get that women love maIes and it can be hard to imagine that people can intentionally be so evil but it is what it is. MaIes have no problems expressing themselves, abusing women is what maIes choose to do because they enjoy & benefit from it - that is their expression.

MaIes see the same news of women being abused, raped, and killed like we do except rather than be disheartened or alarmed they're either apathetic or satisfied. It isn't aliens that's committing GBV it's maIes & maIes have no problem reminding women of this when women anger them (such as rape threats & threatening women they'll end up on the news/true crime). The victim blaming, denial, and derailment of misogyny is part of the game to keep the system alive, they know the events occured & are a systemic occurence they just dont care. Hell not only do they not care, they rejoice in it or get off on it.

MaIes set up environments that work in their favour which simultaneously ensures that women will lose. They know women are set up to live in damn near impossible conditions for us. It's normalised for women to defenselessly share personal & private spaces with beings much more stronger than them with ulterior motives for us, it's trap. It's interesting how these moids aren't saying that they'll just cover up and *poof* harrassment gone, or they'll just pick a nice guy & they'll be okay. MaIes know the net negative they are towards women.

MaIes know that childbirth is a painful process & what do they do? Demand it happens and make it even MORE painful for women. MaIes that impregnate women do not love or care for them. Pregnancy itself is dangerous & sometimes lethal, often comes with a range of health issues, to cause someone to be in that condition especially in a environment where abortions are illegal is reckless & unloving. Now imagine how sinister & full of hatred one has to be to impregnate someone and abuse them on top of that. Many women risk their health & lives to reproduce with a Y and they get abused by said Y instead of being taken care of. Deranged.

Realising that maIes are aware of the evil they inflict is one of the things that radicalised me. It isn't a miscommunication or ignorance issue, their violence is intended. They want control. The cruelty is the point. Instead of wasting time & energy trying to change maIes or hope that they "understand" one day, focus on yourself & other women (who prioritise women). Moids aren't oblivious to female pain they enjoy it. A lot of women treat maIe evil like it's a mistake on maIes part but it's calculated terrorism. I know that this will go over many womens heads as they refuse to hold strong negative sentiments about moids as a collective so if you're not a woman like that, take this post as a sanity check. You aren't crazy, it isn't all in your head.

[blackpilljesus]

Adding honourable comment from the separatist subreddit:

TLDR: Don't waste time debating or educating moids. Focus on (building for) yourself & other women who aren't maIe apologists.

Few others in my gallery I couldn't include in the main post:

[secedenconquer]

Notice the apathy these men talk with about all the horrible suffering women have to endure, as if it's someone else's problem, as if it isn't their mothers, daughters, sisters, and spouses experiencing these horrors first-hand 24/7 trapped on this planet with them. Notice that "sucks to be them🤷‍♂️" attitude as they casually list all the pains women go through. The cold, detached awareness they have of half the population's misery. I don't know how women convince themselves "not all men". Clearly men collectively prefer patriarchy and want to maintain the status quo. Women can stay deluding themselves but reality is reality.

[genderresister]

Men are aware of their sociopolitical and physical advantages that they hold over women and that being male in a male dominated world shields them from the majorities of rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and male violence victimization in general. They are aware of women’s reality, and yet they express no remorse, no empathy, no compassion or regard for women’s humanity and have no desire to make amends or remedy the damage they cause women on a global scale.

This proves men are largely self-serving and misogynistic, attempts to humanize men or consort with them are better spent enriching your own life or those of other women.

[hagfem]

Reminds me of a therapist who worked with abusive men and asked them what they gained from the abuse. Lots of things, obviously. Their only reasons for not being violent were personal consequences to them. Not one word about women deserving better.

Abusive Men Describe the Benefits of Violence - Voice Male magazine

By Chuck Derry For many years, I facilitated courtmandated groups for men who batter. In the early 1980s we were concentrating on healthy re

Like a patriarchy microcosm.

[capricorn-season]

[borgqueens]

As for the Twitter OP’s last question, I want society to change such that the concept of “transitioning” is irrelevant and makes no sense. If we abolish the idea that certain things are for men and certain things are for women, everyone could present however they like without it being associated with their sex.

I won’t prognosticate about the disappearance of autogynephilia, fetishism, and men wanting to access women’s spaces and lesbian spaces for sexual thrills, in a post-gender-abolition society, because maybe males are just Like That, who knows. But if anyone can wear anything and have any job and personality it would be a lot harder for them to deceive others into thinking they’re women.

Most* of the the truly distressed "transition or die" crowd wouldn’t feel that way if children grew up in a society free of gender and homophobia, a society that understands that you can’t be born in the wrong body because bodies have a biological sex but minds don’t.

As for the predatory trans """lesbians"""—the bad men that JK Rowling is talking about—their "happiness" comes at women’s expense. They can just die.

(* = if body dysmorphia specifically focused on secondary sex characteristics continued to exist, it would be understood and treated the same way as other forms of dysmorphia)

[daytimehorrors]

Hate when TRAs are like “radfems suck because they dehumanise women by defining them by their vaginas”.

There is one criteria for being a woman, one box you have to check, and that is being biologically female. You can be literally anything else as long as you check that box, masculine or feminine, a Russian housewife or a Portuguese construction worker or British cottagecore lesbian or American cowherder. 

That is…. so much more liberating than thinking womanhood is femininity, or lipstick, or shaving your legs, or wearing skirts, or conforming to misogynistic ideals, or somehow “feeling” like a woman. 

So yeah. Woman have vaginas. They are also everything and anything else.

[tra-archive]

And to add on to that, you don’t even need a vagina. As long as you’re an adult female human, you’re a woman. So in the case of women with DSDs who may have abnormal genitalia, they’re still women. You can’t be a third sex, you’re either one or the other.

Just like how a man could get his dick blown off in a war or something and he’d still be a man because not having a penis wouldn’t change the fact that he’s an adult human of the male sex, aka all that matters.

Idk how this is so hard for them to understand. Maybe I need to put it in a simpler way: women and men are defined by their sex, meaning they will always be female and male respectively no matter what they look like, act like, and feel like. Acknowledging that women and men are different biologically and have important characteristics that separate them doesn’t mean we’re reducing them to their genitals. Understood?

[diana-lostandfound]

"We're just making up for the girlhood we never got to have!!" 

My friend who left her Amish order at age 19, who was the eldest daughter to a family of nine, who never had a birthday party, whose days of cooking and cleaning and farm labor and taking care of her younger siblings started at 4:30 am, has never felt the urge to do ageplay 

My coworker, who raised her violent younger brother and fended for herself in a filthy double-wide trailer where her parents were either gone or raging drunk at home, who couldn't even dare to invite a friend over because of how horrifying her home life was, has never felt the urge to have a slumber party pillow fight

My neighbor's mother, who grew up as a house girl in southern India, who was born into a life of drugery and hiddenness and abuse, who wasn't allowed to even touch the toilet or dining utensils of the house she was forced to work in for 10 hours a day as a child, has never felt the urge to drink out of a Disney princess sippy cup 

MTFs do not want to experience girlhood. Girlhood as we lived it would have made these pampered, whiny, milksop men kill themselves. They want to live in the sexualized schoolgirl anime that was contrived entirely in the minds of men. None of us got to experience that girlhood, and yet none of us are desperately trying to recreate it as adults now.

[xcounterforcex]

"Parents usually try to protect girls more and dress them in pretty dresses" — yes, because for centuries, women's lives depended on whether the rich rapist would like them and buy them or not. Woman were literally raised for sale like cattle.

Just remember that "princesses," contrary to the stereotypes about their pampering, were mere bargaining chips. They were artificially pushed out of power, driven back to tea parties and dress fittings, because their primary function was to be sold and then regularly subjected to sexual and reproductive violence.

Your idea of ​​womanhood or girlhood is literally built on the propaganda of misogynists (who don't want to lose the opportunity to rape women so they block women's right movement) and the mockery of femicide. Just think about that twice.

[theoretical-terf]

It's pretty clear that a lot of TIM anger comes from jealousy.

They're angry about TIFs being welcomed in lesbian spaces because they want to be there instead, they think they're more worthy of being there. They frame it as concern for "men in lesbian spaces" and it makes them furious, because they know inside that they are the actual men in lesbian spaces.

They're angry about women and TIFs talking about our sex based oppression, because they wish they had oppression to talk about. They try to claim they're oppressed for their dicks, but deep down they're aware that they know nothing about sex based oppression and never will.

They're extremely angry about lesbians existing. They grew up feeling entitled to women's bodies, and lesbians rejecting them made them angry because they wanted access to them. So they tried to make up a workaround by identifying as a lesbian, and it infuriates them when it doesn't work, because they so badly want to force women into having sex with them.

They all try to pretend their anger is about trans rights or justice, but in reality they're just painfully jealous that all they have is male experience and they'll never have anything else.

[nefertitiqueendom]

straight men will never change. Even when they are trying to escape manhood. Male-ness and predatory male tactics are still inside them. The fact they make up the majority of the trans population tells a lot about this movement.

[greygardenias333]

there was one super rapey cotton ceiling post i saw once that was so heinous that like i feel like the need to go find it and make everyone look at it to prove that we are not making it up like they really do say shit like that.

[greygardenias333]

sorry for long post but I found it!!!

it just makes me feel crazy that they will deny that anyone has ever perpetuated this cotton ceiling rhetoric when they make posts like this acting like a woman's lack of attraction to them is a problem to be solved. It doesn't matter why a woman doesn't want to fuck you!!! Coming at her like it's some type of debate and trying to convince her that she's a bad person for not having sex with you is sex pest behavior!!!

Here's another one I found while looking for this one where the same user reblogged that conflates allyship with dating and hookups. Maybe that's why women don't want to be your allies anymore!!!!!!

And here's another one where they're just for real just lying and saying we're the ones who are loudly announcing totally unprompted that we don't want to fuck you!!! No!!! You people will pester us about whether or not we'd theoretically fuck you and then you call us hysterical terfs if we say no!!!! Or you'll hear some random women you don't even know mention that she's only into vagina and you'll take that as a personal attack for some reason because you feel completely fucking entitled to a random woman's body!!!!!

like it reminds me of the scenario in this comic where this person gets offended that a female celebrity that doesn't know they exist would not theoretically fuck them. Like you realize that's a completely normal situation for lesbians since most female celebrities being straight??? who the fuck caresssssssss

[harp-unstrung]

Yeah I can’t imagine why he never hears lesbians say they’re grossed out by vulvas. Weird. I can’t think of a possible reason that lesbians don’t say that. Oh well.

[cordycepsfem]

“This marginalized group of women” are men.

Even if they weren’t, dating is not activism. You are allowed to reject anyone at any time for any reason. Transphobia is not solved by dating trans people, no matter how much they claim it would.

[bushpropaganda]

we've shown these people dozens of posts with thousands of likes and reblogs and shares proving that this is a real thing ppl believe, and instead of admitting that they were wrong, they move the goalpost to "okay it exists but its only a small part of the community. NOBODY says this irl."

wrong! my bisexual ex said to my face that lesbians who won't fuck transwomen are transphobic. we had a huge debate about it that ended with me breaking up with her.

the "cotton ceiling" has real life consequences for lesbians! my own girlfriend believed in lesbian rape rhetoric! this is not some online hyper-niche corner of the internet, this is affecting actual women!!!

[stephexmachina]

when i was a kid i was so mad all the time bc i thought someday i'd have to be somebody's wife i didn't know it was optional. is everybody reminding the young girls in their lives that it's optional.

[stephexmachina]

AND SO IS BEING SOMEBODY'S MOTHER‼️

[stephexmachina]

it is about being a woman. hope that helps!

[vibrantstarfire]

reading comprehension questions for the notes:

is wanting to be a wife and mother a requirement for being a woman?

why might OP be annoyed with replies assuming that this post is about being aroace or transmasc if a woman doesn’t want to be a wife or mother?

are there reasons unrelated to sexuality and romantic interest that might make a woman not want to be a wife or mother?

are there reasons unrelated to gender identity and expression that might make a woman not want to be a wife and mother?

core concept: what is gender essentialism?

is it gender essentialism to imply that all women inherently want to be wives and mothers? could this be what OP is critiquing?

look at the notes OP responds to. is it gender essentialism to imply that being a wife and mother is so affixed to womanhood that to not want to be those things means you’re incapable of sexual/romantic feelings, or not a woman?

what trait are you perpetuating when you assume that women who do not want to be wives and mothers must be aroace or trans? is it gender essentialism?

[gothra]

I’ll never forget when I was arguing with a person in favor of total prison abolition and I asked them “what about violent offenders?” And they said “Well, in a world where prisons have been abolished, we’ll have leveled the playing field and everyone will have their basic needs met, and crime won’t be as much of an issue.” And then I was like “okay. But…no. Because rich people also rape and murder, so it isn’t just a poor person thing. So what will we do about that?” And I don’t think they answered me after that. I’m ashamed to say I continued to think that the problem was that I simply didn’t understand prison abolitionists enough and that their point was right in front of me, and it would click once I finally let myself understand it. It took me a long time to realize that if something is going to make sense, it needs to make sense. If you want to turn theory into Praxis (I’m using that word right don’t correct me I’ll vomit) everyone needs to be on board, which mean it all needs to click and it needs to click fast and fucking clear. You need to turn a complex idea into something both digestible and flexible enough to be expanded upon. Every time I ask a prison abolitionist what they actually intend to do about violent crime, I get directed to a summer reading list and a BreadTuber. It’s like a sleight-of-hand trick. Where’s the answer to my question. There it is. No wait, there it is. It’s under this cup. No it isn’t. “There’s theory that can explain this better than I can.” As if most theory isn’t just a collection of essays meant to be absorbed and discussed by academics, not the average skeptic. “Read this book.” And the book won’t even answer the question. The book tells you to go ask someone else. “Oh, watch this so-and-so, she totally explains it better than me.” Why can’t you explain it at all? Why did you even bring it up if you were going to point me to someone else to give me the basics that you should probably already know? Maybe I’m just one of those crazy people who thinks that some people need to be kept away from the public for everyone’s good. Maybe that just makes me insane. Maybe not believing that pervasive systemic misogyny could be solved with a UBI and a prayer circle makes me a bad guy. But it’s not like women’s safety is a priority anyway. It’s not like there is an objective claim to be made that re-releasing violent offenders or simply not locking them up is deadly.

[a-lesbian-feminist]

I've done a lot of reading about prison abolition, particularly academic sources, and the general idea is that crimes will still happen, but the communty will essentially sort it out on their own.

A lot of prison abolition frameworks rely on what we know about how societies met their own and each others needs before currency. So, if someone needed milk, they'd take eggs from their chicken and trade it with the person who has a cow. This ensured that everyone's physical needs were usually met.

Prison abolitonists won't say it, but their idea of how rape should be handled is exactly how these early agricultural societies handled it. It was a "majority rules" system. Meaning, if the community liked the women more, the man would be ousted or punished. And if the community liked the man more, the woman would be ousted or punished.

The general goal of prison abolition is not a society in which everyone is safe and has their individual needs met. It's a society that's stable and can maintain itself, where most people have their physical needs met enough to reproduce and continue the society.

This is why they can never give you a straight answer. Because the prison abolition framework doesn't aim to abolish rape, it aims to keep it as quiet as possible. Their solution is to keep men only raping their own wives and daughters, and for those women and girls to have enough other needs met that they'll shut up about it for fear of not having those other needs met.

Most prison abolitionists do not actually understand their framework, because they don't read the academic sources and they don't know how their ideal society would function. But the academics know exactly what it would look like, and it's a regressive society where instead of a justice system making prisons to keep the violent men contained, each household has a woman to keep that household's men contained.

If you want to know what prison abolition looks like, don't ask a prison abolitionist who says "I don't know what that would be like". Look at examples of early agricultural communities where their primary goal is survival. That's what it would look like, because in the absence of large scale people management, all of the social duties fall to women.

[benyw]

I'm a prison abolitionist, but only for men: I want to replace prisons with the death penalty (especially for rape) and lashings for lower level offenders. Women who kill their abusers would be put into a women only commune to heal, men who abuse and kill women would be thrashed then hanged. Maybe we could turn child rapists into eunuchs and then work them to death? 🤔 The possibilities for violent males to endure pain and suffering are endless, and prison systems are so mid for realising that dream.

[ivy-michaels]

All these industries with shortages of workers and they can’t figure out why.

Im proposing the hypothesis that the reason we don’t have enough doctors/pilots/bus drivers/etc is that maybe, just maybe, having your entire industry function as a lifelong hazing ritual isn’t the best recruiting strategy.

[ivy-michaels]

Doctors are subject to 8 years of post-secondary education and are forced to work 48 hour shifts.

Pilots and other transportation workers have absurd hours of service requirements that start your rest period as “the moment you shut the vehicle down” and can be as short as 9 hours in some cases.

Railroad workers have to be available on-call 6 days a week and be ready within two hours notice. They don’t get sick time.

Retail workers have to keep a veneer of politeness against any and all abuse or they can be fired.

Truck drivers get paid by mileage and rarely see pay for shipper or receiver delays.

Work should not be designed to make you a miserable burnout and yet here we are.